“Colors, like scents, are a royal road from the outside world to our emotions.” — Peter Schjeldahl*

The Underground Museum—founded in Los Angeles in 2012 by artists Noah Davis and Karon Davis—is dedicated to the exhibition of museum-quality art, and serving as a cultural hub for low-to-moderate-income communities.

According to UM director Megan Steinman, the museum’s current show ARTISTS OF COLOR—the third UM show curated by Noah Davis before his death in 2015—explores “how color is perceived or deployed, and how that can shift over time or by culture.”** Artists represented in the show include Josef Albers, Lita Albuquerque, Michael Asher, Jo Baer, Jeremy Blake, Noah Davis, Dan Flavin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joe Goode, Carmen Herrera, E.J. Hill, Jim Hodges, Jennie C. Jones, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Imi Knoebel, DianaThater, and Brenna Youngblood.

The museum has strong local partnerships with LAXART, MOCA, and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. and future programming will be organized by Karon Davis (Noah’s wife), artist and director Kahlil Joseph (Noah’s brother), and MOCA chief curator Helen Molesworth.

Paris, LA’s final day at Art Basel was spent perusing missed booths at the Miami Beach Convention Center’s main fair, and soaking up the last few rays of sunshine on the beach. There was perhaps no better way to bookend a whirlwind tour of art and culture on both sides of Biscayne Bay, stretching into late night and early morning parties.

The Saturday and Sunday crowd was noticeably more casual than at Wednesday’s VIP preview, and a number of works had been replaced with others, having been bought off the wall by collectors earlier in the week. Still, a number of standouts remained. Katharina Fritsch’s bright orange Octopus drew viewers into Matthew Marks’s booth, where a stunning new Ellsworth Kelly aluminum wall sculpture was displayed near polyurethane objects by Fischli/Weiss and a photograph by Thomas Demand. Luhring Augustine displayed one of Rachel Whitread’s Untitled (Stories) sculptures, a cast of the negative space around books on a shelf, which the artist later used in her poetic Vienna Holocaust Memorial.

Some works humorously reappeared, referenced by other artists. Doug Aitken’s Exit (Large), on display in Regen Projects’ booth, appeared in an Eric Fischl painting not far away. Jeff Koons’s Balloon Rabbit appeared suspended upside down from a totem pole in a Jason Rhodes sculpture, on display at David Zwirner’s Basel booth.

Fergus McCaffrey presented a colorful survey of Jack Early works, particularly homoerotic paintings of crotch close-ups on children’s wallpaper, featuring cheerful hand-holding soldiers. A canary yellow phonograph in the center of the gallery played Early’s “Biography in 20 Minutes”, recounting how the artist chose the wallpaper for his first bedroom, further referencing his memories of queer childhood and early budding sexuality. Another arresting survey show was Alison Knowles’s The Boat Book, sponsored by James Fuentes of New York. A series of wooden frames painted and draped in silkscreens, prints, photographs and maritime diagrams, The Boat Book looks like an unfolded large-scale scrapbook, memorializing the artist’s fisherman brother.

Urs Fischer’s Small Rain drew curious crowds to the Sadie Coles HQ, London booth. Nearby Galerie Buchholz’s booth featured a stunning mechanistic sculpture by newcomer Simon Denny, with the familiar Snapchat ghost logo embedded like a 3D phantom in a plastic cube atop a computer server. Artist Sean Raspet also drew crowds to Société gallery’s booth in the Nova section with a wall of plastic tanks filled with a manufactured green polyether substance.

Hauser & Wirth exhibited an impressive new teardrop-shaped sculpture by Mark Bradford. Other fair favorites included Jose Dávila, whose marble and glass slabs precariously pitched outward on colorful red and orange straps were shown at a half dozen galleries from Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Sherrie Levine’s minimalist objects in glass cases were scattered all over the winding Basel booths.

At the booth for famed editions workshop and gallery Gemini G.E.L., new works by Richard Serra, Julie Mehretu, and Sophie Calle were on display. Serra’s monochromatic black Rift series was partly inspired by rubbings of asphalt textures in the Gemini parking lot. Mehretu’s Myriads, Only By Dark, composed of many layers of finely colored inks and intricately textured gestures in black, took over a year to complete. Calle’s work, In Memory of Frank Gehry’s Flowers, featured a collage cut-out of dried flowers given to the artist by her friend, architect Frank Gehry, in honor of her exhibition openings, alongside photographs of the flowers when fresh and a vase of real roses designed by Gehry himself.

Between 250 galleries at Art Basel alone, 10 independent art fairs, and countless events, parties, exhibition openings, performances, and lectures, it was truly impossible to see it all here in Miami this week. Some important lessons were learned: few people come to Miami Beach in early December to view artwork. Perusing the fairs is like speed-dating high culture–there simply isn’t time to stop and study. As the fashion and music industries have teamed up with Art Basel, many more have arrived just for the parties, and parties they find: many of them last late into the night and well past sunrise. And as Art Basel has grown, so has Miami, sprouting gleaming new residential skyscrapers (including the new Zaha Hadid 10 Museum Park) that crowd out the two-lane boulevards and classic white Art Deco hotels.

If you plan on attending Art Basel Miami Beach next year, don’t forget to pack good walking shoes, your favorite hangover cure, and a well-planned schedule. With the right preparation, you won’t find a better way to spend the first days of winter.

“PARISLA is born of shared perspectives. It’s a project, like a love story, that comes from the feeling of being in one place, thinking about another. A place between two cities, between scenes, between people, that exists only in the space of our imagination. In Paris, dreaming of the Pacific. Speaking French in LA. And it’s as true as a clear blue sky above us.”—Dorothée Perret, founding editor (Paris, November 9, 2008)